UChicago Professional

Editors who build strong careers are not just skilled at editing. They are trusted by the people they work with.

The Working with Authors course from UChicago begins August 10, and is designed to help editors move beyond technical ex*****on into the relationship driven side of the profession.

This is where many careers accelerate. Editors who can manage projects, communicate clearly, and build trust with authors are the ones who retain clients, generate referrals, and take on more complex and higher value work.

Over seven weeks, participants develop practical strategies for handling author relationships, setting expectations, managing timelines, and navigating challenges with professionalism. The course also introduces the business side of editing, including pricing, positioning, and building a sustainable client base.

For freelance editors, this means stronger client retention and a more consistent pipeline of work. For in house professionals, it strengthens cross functional collaboration and positions you for greater responsibility across projects.

Learn more and register:

https://professional.uchicago.edu/find-your-fit/courses/working-with-authors

Leadership expectations are shifting, and organizations are actively looking for leaders who can coach, support, and develop their teams, not just manage them.

Recent research makes it clear why building coaching capability is becoming essential for career progression:
• Leadership and manager development is the number one priority for HR leaders, highlighting just how critical strong leadership skills have become. (Gartner)

• 75% of HR leaders say managers are overwhelmed, and 70% believe current leadership training is not preparing them effectively, creating a clear gap for professionals who invest in developing these skills. (Gartner)

• Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends research shows a major shift toward leaders being expected to focus more on people development, communication, and adaptability, all core elements of coaching.

• Insights from nearly 13,000 business and HR leaders in Deloitte’s study reinforce that leadership capability is now central to business performance and long-term success.

For professionals looking to strengthen their leadership impact and stay competitive, developing executive coaching skills is no longer optional. It is a practical way to improve how you lead, communicate, and drive results.

The Executive Coaching for Leaders program from Chicago Booth is designed to help you build these capabilities and apply them immediately in your role. Earn a Booth credential with an 8-week online course or take personalized coaching sessions.

Building a strong team of leaders? Special course pricing for 3 or more team enrollments. Early bird pricing for the course until August 10.

Learn more.

https://professional.uchicago.edu/find-your-fit/courses/executive-coaching-leaders-program

For professionals looking to strengthen their writing, communication, and editorial skill set, strong editing capabilities can open opportunities across publishing, healthcare, marketing, corporate communications, legal, and digital content industries.

Join UChicago’s upcoming online Information Session for our Editing Certificate program. Explore career pathways within the field, and hear how our nationally-recognized program helps you develop practical, industry-relevant editing skills grounded in the principles of The Chicago Manual of Style. Gain essential skills, expert insights, and an active and welcoming industry network.

Tue., July 21 | 12:00–1:00 pm CT

Register to attend the event:

https://professional.uchicago.edu/events/information-session-editing-07-21-26

Freelance writing and editing can be a lucrative, high-demand career. UChicago's 7-week online course, Freelancing for Medical Writers and Editors, will help you discover whether freelancing is the right choice for you and teach you skills that can help you launch and run a successful freelance business.

If you are trying to increase your success as a freelancer or are looking into starting your own business, you will find important information, insider tips, business skills, and more within this standalone course. It covers best practices for freelancers and gives you the knowledge and tools to avoid common mistakes. You will create a vision for your business, determine what “success” means to you, and develop detailed plans for running the business and marketing your services to clients.

Class starts August 24. Earn a UChicago credential upon successful completion of this course.

Save your seat today:

https://professional.uchicago.edu/find-your-fit/courses/freelancing-medical-writing-editing?language_content_entity=en

If you want to move into editing or take on more advanced editorial work, this is a good place to start.

The Basic Manuscript Editing course from UChicago begins June 22 and is designed to help professionals build the skills and credibility needed to step into editorial roles or expand their current responsibilities.

Grounded in The Chicago Manual of Style, the course develops the technical and decision-making skills required for professional copyediting. These are the capabilities that open doors to roles in publishing, content teams, and freelance editorial work, where consistency, accuracy, and editorial judgment are expected as standard.

For many, this course serves as the transition point from general writing or content work into dedicated editing roles, or as a way to formalize experience and take on higher value projects. It also forms part of the pathway into UChicago's nationally-recognized Editing Certificate program, supporting longer term career development.

This course provides a structured way to build the skills and credibility needed to stay competitive in editorial work.

Learn more and register:

https://courses.professional.uchicago.edu/search/publicCourseSearchDetails.do?method=load&courseId=20678

Executive Coaching expert, Chris Lecatsas-Lyus, sees coaching as an essential discipline that helps senior leaders loosen their grip on control and build the self-awareness their teams need to succeed.

Today’s leaders need a more reflective repertoire for dealing with moments when command-and-control habits fall short. Teams are trying to adapt to AI-driven transformation, intergenerational tensions, changing performance demands, and a broader climate of interpersonal uncertainty.

She has found that one of the assumptions leaders most need challenged is the belief that good leadership means having all the answers. This makes having questions, and having the courage to ask them, challenging. The resistance is that just asking the question concedes a gap in what the leader is supposed to know. “It takes a great deal of courage to do it, which is why a lot of leaders don’t,” she says. “It’s coaching that can offer both the framework and the permission for taking that step.”

It’s when leaders develop skills in these sorts of areas, like delegating rather than doing or asking rather than answering, that coaching-based leadership becomes practical rather than abstract. It shows up in how a manager gives feedback or asks a team member to identify options instead of simply complying with instructions. Coaching changes how teams and organizations work. The research links coaching to stronger goal attainment, resilience, and workplace well-being.

“It can be extremely tough to be a leader,” she says, “but I don’t think the best leaders are simply tough. The best leaders are self-aware.” Her focus for more than two decades has been on coaching senior leaders. Trained in psychotherapy and counseling alongside her coaching work, she leads the executive coaching provision for the global Executive MBA (EMBA) program at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and has helped design the Executive Coaching for Leaders program at Booth that includes an eight-week course rooted in that trauma-informed psychotherapeutic foundation.

Read more of her insights in the full article.

https://professional.uchicago.edu/stories/what-coaching-teaches-leaders

The difference between being understood and being taken seriously often comes down to how clearly and correctly something is written.

The Essentials of Grammar for Professionals course from UChicago begins July 6 and is designed for professionals who want to eliminate avoidable errors that undermine credibility in business, academic, and editorial environments.

Rather than treating grammar as theory, this course focuses on how language actually functions in professional communication. Participants work through sentence structure, punctuation, and syntax in context, building the ability to identify and correct issues that impact clarity, tone, and interpretation.

For professionals working in content, communications, or client facing roles, this is about reducing risk. Clear, controlled writing supports better decision-making, stronger client trust, and more effective communication across teams.

If your work depends on how your writing is received, this course strengthens the foundation that everything else sits on.

Learn more and register:

https://courses.professional.uchicago.edu/search/publicCourseSearchDetails.do?method=load&courseId=20692

Max Gold, an instructor for UChicago’s Quantum Science, Networking, and Communications course, studies privacy, security, and information processing in quantum systems from a theoretical perspective. He came to theory after several years of experimental work on ultra-cold atoms, where gases get chilled to expose their quantum behavior.

One thing students are looking for, he says, is some clarification of the strangeness in the field. “A lot of them come in wanting to understand what’s so wacky about all of this,” he says, “which is exactly where the course starts.”

The course runs eight weeks online, with twice-weekly live sessions paired with self-paced material. The first weeks build out the mathematical toolbox of quantum states, measurements, and the linear algebra needed to track how those systems evolve. By the middle of the course, students are programming in Qiskit, IBM’s quantum software, designing circuits, implementing canonical algorithms, and running their first simulations of quantum key distribution. From there, the curriculum moves into communication protocols, hardware, and a multi-node network exercise in SeQUeNCe, a tool developed at Argonne National Laboratory and UChicago that lets researchers model quantum networks before the hardware to support them arrives at scale. Both institutions are part of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, the consortium that manages the course and brings together much of the region's quantum research infrastructure.

Gold thinks the variety of student backgrounds is part of why the course works so well. “You get a variety of different ways to start a problem,” he says. “Other students see that people think about things differently.” Quantum is a field where different starting points produce different intuitions, and the course makes that visible.

Hear more of his thoughts and learn more about the course start dates and special early bird pricing:

https://professional.uchicago.edu/stories/quantums-incremental-arrival

For Michael Butts, CEO of the Workforce Mobilization firm Burtch Works, the Chief AI Officers leading companies through the Fourth Industrial Revolution succeed by starting with the business, not the technology.

Butts’s core conviction is that too many organizations still approach AI as a technology decision. They start from the tools and work backward toward a problem. The perspective switch he calls for involves treating it instead as a business decision. That way, a new model or better agent doesn’t require rebuilding the whole strategy. Operating in this environment, calls for a trilingual CAIO. "The three languages you need are analytics, technology, and business," he notes.

Today’s CAIO is forward-deployed with the business and also responsible for delivering enterprise value. “They understand very intimately how to run a P&L,” he says, “and how to drive efficiency and effectiveness within an existing business process.”

“You need to be able to reset and align,” he says. That means a short assessment period that includes a clear analysis of where the business is operating today and where the opportunities are for growth and profitability. Out of that will emerge a customized and incremental plan that’s agreed to across the leadership team. Without it, frustration builds and the foundation of the role starts to drift.

This is the mindset Butts wants his students in the CAIO program at Chicago Booth to take back to their companies. “The lens students come out with is one situated within the business,” he says. “It’s an outcome-based lens. They learn to build strategically and incrementally and with a clear focus on helping organizations evolve into a future desired state.”

Part of that evolution is how AI changes the jobs to be done. While the technology and the infrastructure will keep evolving, what won’t change is the need for a leader who can translate what AI makes possible into what a specific business truly needs.

Read the full article:

https://professional.uchicago.edu/stories/when-leading-ai-start-business-technology

Enjoy your weekend.